My Life As a Paulette

PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s friendship with New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. The writer became a follower of Pauline Kael, or a “Paulette,” as her acolytes were derisively known, in the spring of 1969, when he answered a summons to her apartment, at Central Park West and 93rd St. He had been introduced to her two years ago by Paul Warshow, but knew her only slightly. He was a graduate student in California and he’d sent Kael some short movie reviews. Mentions a letter he’d written to The New York Review of Books that she was interested in reading. At her apartment, she read the letter aloud. Kael lived in the apartment with her daughter, Gina James, and liked having company––usually young disciples––at night when she wasn’t working. She had recently completed her second year at The New Yorker, writing sentences with a brazen force unknown among the magazine’s critics at the time. Two years before she arrived at the magazine, the paperback version of her first collection of pieces, “I Lost It at the Movies,” had been published; it sold more than 150,000 copies. At 49, she had suddenly become successful, and she was at once cocky, overbearing, and friendly. In her soft, lilting voice, she tore through conversations like a projectile. Mentions her dislike of “The Graduate.” She had a special way with the young––motherly but brilliant, erudite but informal, morally alert but bawdy. She insisted she was right about everything. She offered a song of liberation from the academy of criticism. What she said and wrote came out of her reading and viewing and her life… People sought her praise energetically. Over the years, she consciously attempted to shape the careers and morale of scores of young people, and she accepted their love as her due. In her affectionate way, she was more interested in dominating people than anyone the writer’s ever met. At the end of the summer, she recommended the writer for a film criticism post at The Atlantic Monthly. Those who started out reviewing films in the late 1960s and early 1970s realized they had stumbled into a happy moment. Kael promoted American pop movies free of the formal rigors of European high culture. In 1970, the writer quit school and returned to New York, where he spent numerous evenings at Kael’s apartment gabbing until 2 or 3 in the morning. Kael grew up on a chicken farm in Sonoma County, California, and went to Berkeley in the late 1930s as a philosophy major, but never graduated. She was married and divorced a few times, and worked as a seamstress, a nanny, etc. In the 1960s, she presented herself, through her criticism, as a plainspoken Westerner observing East Coast “cultural snobbery.” She was an intellectual in a raucous style not seen since the 1920s, and she couldn’t hide her contempt for New York’s ruling critical elite. Some called her a “ball-breaker,” but she had a romantic appreciation for machismo. She believed American critics weren’t ballsy enough. Kael looked below the surface of a movie without ever giving up on that surface. She also dealt firmly with studios and directors––a genuinely independent American critic. Unfortunately, she created conformity among her disciples. She couldn’t remain friends for long with anyone who consistently fought her, and many of her followers acquiesced to her bullying. The group became a cult. Describes Kael’s personal canon. She was sure that there wasn’t a single academic tradition in film that couldn’t be overturned in an instant. She believed in sensation––not serious “themes”––which could force audiences into complex responses. The constant tangling and untangling of the sensual and the ethical kept her judgements fresh, even startling. The writer admits that the desire to please her colored his work; he sometimes imitated her rhythms. Two years into his job at The Atlantic, he found out that Pauline considered him an imitator. She grew distant. In late 1972 or early 1973, she called to tell him that he had no talent for criticism. In the years that followed, he rarely spoke to her, although he often carried on a dialogue with her in his head. He knew he was better off without her friendship. In 1976, he got a job with the Boston Phoenix and began to removed the borrowed rhythms. There’s something dishonest about the master-disciple relationship. Mentions Kael’s cruel criticism of director Nicholas Ray in 1970. By the 1980s, Kael’s notion that pop could be subversive was beginning to look a little tattered; the new American ritual was not respect for high culture but contempt for it. The writer, in getting away from pop, was able to throw off an ill-fitting personal influence. Mentions going to see “Cromwell” and “Deep Throat” with Kael. In movie criticism, she’s unlikely to have a successor. She retired in 1991, and, before her death on September 3, 2001, the writer saw her only once––at her 80th birthday party, in 1999; she never spoke to him. Mentions the obituary he wrote for her in The New Yorker.